To put it bluntly, a land deed was something you asked for when you wanted to buy land in the underworld. It was similar to current land deeds, except that the land you bought was land in the underworld where you would live. At that time, writing land deeds was basically trading with the underworld, so most of them were useless and considered a shady affair. Only those who had no descendants would make a living helping others write them.

I once received rubbings of a land deed that was unearthed in Yahong, Sichuan Province. I even remembered some of the contents, which read:

Xu Guo died on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of the fourth year of Tiansheng, Bingyin Tai Sui (1), in Zhu Ming Town, Jiguo village, Hongya County, Jia Province. Lord Xu spent ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine coins…

Since the land deed’s contents focused on where the tomb was and information on the tomb owner, Poker-Face’s idea was very accurate.

As we stood at the edge of the sarcophagus and looked down, we saw Poker-Face place his feet on both sides of the well and carefully look at the area beneath the corpse. I handed him my cell phone and he took a picture before handing it back to me. There was a whole slate beneath the body that was full of inscriptions, but they were hard to see because of all the barnacle-like things covering it. Fatty lowered a hammer down and Poker-Face began knocking the barnacles off. As the words were revealed, he slowly read them aloud for us: "Minyue (2) snakes, South Sea’s King Zhi."

"What the hell? South Sea?” Fatty asked. "Isn't it the West Sea?"

"Fat Master, you just said that even though the West Sea’s Falling Cloud Country is fictitious, there should be a foundation for it,” Jin Wantang said. “The South Sea’s King Zhi and the West Sea’s Falling Cloud… changing a single word to fabricate a whole story is really ingenious. South Sea… was it really a country in the South Sea?" His eyes suddenly gleamed and he jumped up.

We all looked at Jin Wantang, who frowned and said, "Minyue snakes… it was said that people in the seven ancient Fujian countries worshiped snakes. If it’s both Fujian and snakes, then that means that the land deeds were bought for land in Fujian’s underworld and the people were from the Baiyue ethnic group. The “Classic of Mountain and Sea” said that Fujian was in the sea. In other words, this area was in the sea and separated from the mainland a long time ago. That makes the story of Tianmu chasing a cloud all the way to the seaside more credible. He might not have gone west, but south. So, it wasn’t the West Sea’s Falling Cloud Country, but the South Sea’s Falling Cloud Country. The West Sea’s Falling Cloud Country is in the South Sea!"

He looked at the body and continued, "Is this corpse the monarch of a South Sea country? Was it an ancient country bordering Fujian and Jiangxi along the coast of China at that time that disappeared sometime during the Han Dynasty?""What's so special about this guy? What does it have to do with listening to thunder?” I asked him as I looked at the corpse’s ears. It really didn’t look like a custom of the Central Plains people.

"Since this South Sea country was very small and existed for a short period of time, there are very few records of it,” Jin Wantang said. “I only know that after the destruction of the country, the survivors all went out to sea. After the countless ships left, they never appeared again. Even the South Sea King was missing. I didn't expect such a king to have such a luxurious tomb. They really spared no amount of effort in this regard. In addition, the only thing related to listening to thunder was the legend of Tianmu chasing clouds."

If it was a South Sea country, then that would explain these barnacles. Maybe the South Sea King’s tomb was flooded by sea water at one point, and the Yang family accidentally brought the barnacles back with them when they stole the coffin.

Poker-Face whistled at me from below, so I handed my phone down again. He landed near the bottom of the well, took a photo, and threw the phone back up. When I looked at the photo, I saw dozens of decayed tapes that were stuck to the bottom of the slate under the bronze scales at the bottom of the well.

Poker-Face contracted his bones again and climbed back up. There were about forty decayed tapes that were all lined up and looked very old. The tapes inside had long been broken, and copious amounts of sludge were stuck in them, making it impossible to rewind them.

"It seems that Comrade Yang Daguang once hid at the bottom of this well and recorded thunder," Fatty murmured. "Why didn't he take these tapes away?"

I could see if there were only one or two tapes, but he had prepared so many and didn’t bother taking them with him. "Maybe he didn't record what he wanted to hear," I said.

Poker-Face suddenly shook his head and we all looked at him. "He didn't record thunder in the well, he played it in the well," he said.

I paused before suddenly breaking out in a cold sweat, "What do you mean?"

He took out a bronze scale and put it in my hand. "This is some kind of musical instrument for thunder."I frowned and suddenly understood what he was getting at. The thunder came down from the sky, passed through the amplifier above, and then resonated in the well below, stimulating these bronze pieces into making special sounds. Did that mean it was a kind of translator that could translate the information that was in the thunder?

It was a bold speculation, but the bronze pieces were all rotten now, so the sound we heard was too muddled to be sure.

It wouldn’t thunder every time Yang Daguang came here, so he would bring a tape recording of thunder whenever he did come. He would play it in the well in order to hear what information was in the thunder.

If he was willing to abandon the tapes here, maybe they didn’t have what he wanted. Or maybe he couldn’t hear anything like us and he threw them away out of frustration. These bronze pieces seemed to have decayed a long time ago, after all. And that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that he died in that secluded room without leaving any useful clues. He clearly didn't learn much.

But it wasn’t like it was nothing since he had persisted for so long. He should’ve found something…right?

As I looked at the bronze piece very carefully, Fatty said to me in a grave voice, "We have to go to the place where these murals came from if we want to know what happened."

"You just want to fucking find something," I said angrily.

Fatty didn’t even bother denying it and simply nodded, "Do you remember those strange things we encountered in the Fujian mountains before? Don’t you think they have some connection to this South Sea country?"

****

TN Notes:

(1) According to Baidu, this is from a real Song Dynasty tomb discovered on 8/21/2009 in Sichuan Province. I think this person died around 1027 AD, since this says the Tiansheng era was 1023-1032. Bingyin is the 3rd year of the 60-year cycle. Tai Sui is the star god/deity presiding over the year, but can also be an ancient way of saying "year". Bingyin Tai Sui is the year of the tiger zodiac-wise (if that helps at all).

(2) An ancient kingdom in what is now the Fujian province in southern China. It was a contemporary of the Han dynasty. Its inhabitants were groups of indigenous non-Chinese tribes called the Baiyue. More info here.